In his peerless works, such as "A Christmas Carol," "Bleak House" and "Great Expectations," Charles Dickens all but created our conception of Victorian England.

Virtuous waifs and wicked misers, plucky orphans and mysterious benefactors, hypocritical snobs and loyal friends: They all populate the universe of Dickens, who was born nearly 201 years ago, on Feb. 7, 1812.

His most memorable characters also include happy spouses and smiling children -- the most important people of all, the people who graced the most beloved of Dickens' institutions: the home.

The irony was that Dickens, according to what most scholars now consider indisputable evidence, was a philanderer who split up his family.

In May 1858, at age 46, one of the most famous men in the British Empire separated from Catherine Dickens, his wife of 22 years -- the 43-year-old mother of his 10 children -- for an actress named Nelly Ternan, with whom he had become infatuated months earlier, when she was 18.

The pair may or may not have had a child who died in infancy in France, but this much is accurate: Dickens and Ternan were together until a fatal stroke struck him in 1870, at age 58.

Dickens' private escapades, while they do nothing to diminish his stature as an artist, make him a more compelling and complex person. Dickens was a fun-loving hero to his children, especially when they were young. He was also a heel.

He complained to his friends that his offspring disappointed him. He told them he believed his wife, whom he never divorced, was an unloving mother. He said they became more estranged because of "a mental disorder under which she sometimes labours."

Partly because of his comments and an ill-advised "personal statement" he had published in the Times of London, in June 1858, the public generally knew of Dickens' domestic woes. And among London socialites, whispers lingered of Dickens taking up with a much younger woman.

But, as Dickens authority Michael Slater shows in his information-packed book, "The Great Charles Dickens Scandal," popular interest in Dickens' personal life largely stayed muted for decades, until December 1933, after the death of Sir Henry Dickens.

"He was Dickens's last surviving child and the popular press suddenly became even more Dickens-minded," Slater writes.

As time passed, journalists and scholars shed even more inhibitions about delving into what really went on inside the Dickenses' household. Slater, an emeritus professor of Victorian literature at the University of London, acts as a compiler and a literary detective as he traces the history of the Dickens-Ternan affair.

In a matter-of-fact style, he graciously acknowledges the groundbreaking work of other Dickens' scholars, most notably Claire Tomalin, who wrote the landmark "The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens" (1990) and the masterful "Charles Dickens: A Life" (2012).

As Slater did in his own "Charles Dickens" (2009), he avoids speculation and focuses on facts. Watching them pile up is one of his new book's pleasures.

Robert Gottlieb, a former editor of The New Yorker, is more elegant as he reconstructs the lives of the Dickens children. He divides his book, the aptly titled "Great Expectations," into what happened to them before and after the death of their famous father.

The sad stories outnumber the inspiring tales. You are left to wonder how much Dickens' flaws -- his impetuousness, his sometimes overbearing rectitude and, in the end, his treatment of his wife, which divided his family's allegiances -- outweighed his brilliance and his genuine paternal affections, largely dooming his seven sons and three daughters.

Plus, they never could have eclipsed the greatness of their father, whom his contemporaries called The Inimitable.

Perhaps, as Gottlieb suggests, Dickens struggled with the reality that his flesh-and-blood clan was far more difficult to shape than his fictional brood: Oliver Twist, Little Nell, Tiny Tim, David Copperfield, Amy Dorrit, Pip and so many others.

Gottlieb captures this tension most insightfully in a section on the Dickenses' daughter Dora, who died in 1851, when she was 8 months old. At the time of her birth, Dickens was working on "David Copperfield," in which David's bubbleheaded but adorable wife, Dora, falls fatally ill.

Dickens, as Gottlieb recounts, wrote to Catherine about the time their baby was born, "I still have Dora to kill -- I mean the Copperfield Dora -- and cannot make certain how long it will take to do."

Gottlieb goes on to refer to John Forster, Dickens' closest friend and first biographer.

"The real Dora was born, and a week later the fictional one was dead," Gottlieb writes. "Forster, in his biography, suggests that Dickens may have hoped to give some posthumous life to the loving, foolish child-wife he had created for his book and who was one of his favorite characters, but nothing can really explain naming one's newborn after a character you are in the process of killing off. What can Catherine have made of this?"

What are we to make of this?

What are we to make of Charles Dickens?

ED PALATTELLA would like to read all of Dickens' 17 novels eventually. He can be reached at 870-1813. Send e-mail to ed.palattella@timesnews.com.